Thanks to the United States Supreme Court, Proposition 209 isn’t going anywhere.

Although the plurality opinion affirmed that the constitutionality of “race-conscious admissions policies” was not at stake, the court concluded that Michigan voters didn’t violate the Constitution when they chose to ban public affirmative action programs.

Ironically, California government and California interest groups went to bat against those voters. In addition to the state itself, the UC system joined with several urban high school districts and even BART to urge the court to constitutionally protect affirmative action.

They lost. Now, Californians must find a way to put the controversy behind them.

For some activists, no amount of preferential treatment is ever enough. Rather than celebrating news that California Latinos, for instance, now exceed whites in UC freshman admissions, they worry that people will actually come to believe that affirmative action programs have done their job and can be let go.

Rather than reflecting on why Asian Americans mobilized to torpedo the recent bill designed to hard-wire affirmative action into our state Constitution, activists have complained that minorities who support race-neutral admissions don’t understand their own best interests.

It’s true that some communities lumped into broad racial minority categories access education-driven upward mobility far less reliably than others. Not all Latinos or Asian Americans face the same kinds of challenges – much like whites and other ethnic groups.

It’s also true that some good can be done by shifting the focus of preferential consideration away from race and toward those with relatively few economic and social resources.

On the other hand, it’s time Californians – and all Americans – begin to realize that life has changed in some big ways.

Higher education can make the difference between a life of fruitful effort and a life of empty struggle. But millennials and their families are learning hard lessons about just how little you can count on a college degree to get you ahead. Trying to find a solid job without a college degree has been tough for a long time. Now, having a BA to put on your resume often isn’t helping.

Master’s degrees might move your resume up in the pile. But they’ll add to your debt burden, too. The bottom line is, admission to a prestigious college (or two) just isn’t the ticket to a stable, productive life that it used to be.

Importantly, students who no longer benefit from affirmative action can still get into college and do well. In today’s ideological climate, however, what seems to matter more than that is the wounded pride that always seems to surround identity politics.

Identity politics has become so much of an end in itself that beneficiaries of affirmative action are routinely encouraged to focus their studies on the politics of their own racial and ethnic identity. In its current incarnation, affirmative action isn’t just designed to get more diversity into America’s elite. It’s part of a broader agenda that tempts minority students to focus more on becoming experts in their identity than in any practical skill or discipline.

That emphasis isn’t the product of bad intentions. It’s actually a mistaken attempt to address a real problem: many kids from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups need something to take pride in, and strongly desire to feel more pride in themselves. (That’s frequently true of more advantaged kids, too, but affirmative action can’t even pretend to address that problem.)

That’s why Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented so vehemently from the court’s plurality opinion upholding Michigan’s law. She urged the court – and the rest of us – to agree that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.”

For her, that meant extending constitutional protection to affirmative action programs. Unfortunately for Sotomayor, she is right about the problem but wrong about the solution. Affirmative action doesn’t strike at the source of racial discrimination. It doesn’t even guarantee its beneficiaries access to an independent source of pride in themselves.

Sometimes, of course, those who benefit from affirmative action – and those who socialize with the beneficiaries – all wind up better off. Culturally speaking, the trouble with affirmative action isn’t that it always harms those it purports to help.

The trouble is that it does more harm than good when it comes to launching an open and candid conversation about race in America. Education isn’t the area where we’re hurting minorities most. Anyone familiar with the criminal justice system knows that the greatest injustice is by far to be found in America’s vicious cycle of targeted policing, incarceration, family destruction, dependency, drugs, and criminality. It’s there that minorities are disproportionately harmed in an egregious, systemic way – creating just the kind of deep-seated inequalities that affirmative action proponents wisely recognize but unwisely hope to correct for by twisting the Constitution.

Whatever its advantages, affirmative action takes our eye off the ball of bringing equality to America’s racial and ethnic groups with lasting integrity. Now that Prop. 209 is here to stay, it’s time to work together on reform from the bottom up.

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